Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (42 page)

“In Brittany it was believed that only one yew tree, which was considered the tree of the dead, could grow in a cemetery because its roots descend into the mouths of all of the dead who were buried there.”

—J
ACQUES
B
ROSSE
,
M
YTHOLOGIE DER
B
ÄUME
[M
YTHOLOGY OF THE
T
REES
], 1990

In the year 1854 Ludwig Bechstein reported about the astonishing medicinal effect of the
Hexenschmiere
(witches’ grease):

When a sick person is smeared with it he will become healthy, and when a healthy person is smeared with it he will become sick and die (Bechstein, 1986: 224).

The association of witches with medicinal salves reached into the twenty-first century. In the nineteenth century the pharmaceutical preparation
Unguentum nervinum,
nerve salve, was still called “devil’s salve” in the vernacular.
Oleum philosophorum
was “devil’s oil,” and a camphor-soaked bandage was the “devil’s bandage” (Arends, 1935: 226). A nerve salve was prepared from the pressed oil of laurel berries and other plants (Mercatante, 1980: 58).
Unguentum flavum
was called gland salve (Arends, 1935: 63). The German word for gland,
Druse,
¹¹⁵
derives from druid, but it is also reminiscent of
Drude
or
Trude
(nightmare), which originally meant the
Druck
(pressure) of nightmares and was also a term for scary demons (Reinhardt, 1993).

The pharmaceutical poplar salve
(Unguentum populi)
was also called by the somewhat ironic common name apostle salve (Arends, 1935: 15). Poplar salve still exists in pharmacies, but it is now made without the psychoactive—the actually effective—ingredients. The salve is suited for infections of the sinus passages, hemorrhoids, wounds, burns, and more.

In the 1938 edition of
Hagers Handbuch der pharmzeutischen Praxis
[Hager’s Handbook of Pharmaceutical Practice] there is a “true” witches salve recipe, a blended poplar pomade:
¹¹⁶
“Pomatum Populi compositum: 100 T. each of powdered, dried belladonna, henbane, poppy, and nightshade leaves are mixed, soaked thoroughly with 400 T. alcohol (95%), after 24 hours in water bath 3 hours long with 4000 T. rendered pork lard, then add 800 T. dried poplar buds (not over one year old), leave a further 10 hours in water bath, sqeeze out vigorously, let sit and then strain” (vol. 2: 513).

Yew: The Healing Tree of the Witches

Hoffmann (1660–1742), the chemist from Hall, Germany, expanded the ingredients in the witches’ salves and the visionary “sleeping salves” to include the nightshade plants and opium in addition to the poison of the feared yew (
Taxus baccata
L., Taxaceae).
¹¹⁷
Yews can live to be five thousand years old and are some of the oldest trees in the world (Chetan and Breuton, 1994; Hartzell, 1991). The yew is a shamanic tree, a World Tree, a tree of life, for it is simultaneously a poison, a medicine, and an intoxicating substance—in other words, another true pharmakon. The words
toxic
and
toxicology
derive from the Latin name for yew
(Taxus).

Sextius says that the Greek name for this tree [the yew] is
milax
, and that in Arcadia its poison is so active that people who go to sleep or picnic beneath a yew-tree die. Some people also say that this is why poisons were called “taxic,” which we now pronounce as “toxic,” meaning “used for poisoning arrows.” I find it stated that a yew becomes harmless if a copper nail is driven into the actual tree (Pliny,
Natural History
XVI.51).